The Live of Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is one of the great painters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Though ferociously private, he spoke on the phone almost daily for many years to his close confidante and collaborator William Feaver - about painting and the art world, but also about his life and loves. Feaver wrote down their conversations immediately and typed up his hand-written account the next day.

Shot through with Freud's own words, Feaver brings the elusive, maddening genius to life in this definitive and extraordinary work, both autobiography and biography. In the first of two volumes, he conjures Freud's early childhood - the grandson of Sigmund Freud, born into a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escaping Nazi Germany in 1934 and dropped into an English public school. Following Freud through art school, his time in the Merchant Navy during the war, his post-war adventures in Europe, and his setting up as a painter in the then-seedy Maida Vale, Feaver traces a brilliant, difficult young man's coming of age, rejecting the popular style of his contemporaries to create art entirely on his own terms. A passionate and often destructive lover, with swathes of admirers both male and female, the young Freud blazes on the page, tearing like a comet through post-war bohemian London.